Substack CEO on the platform’s new AI detector

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Meghan McCarty Carino** (0:31)
This episode was 100 percent human made. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Meghan McCarty Carino.
Want to know if a Substack newsletter was likely generated by AI? Now you don't have to guess. The platform recently launched an AI detector powered by Pangram, which has emerged as the leading tool for identifying content generated by large language models. The new Substack feature allows users to scan a piece of text on the website or in the iOS app and get an estimate of how much was written by a human or by AI.
And as anything AI related tends to do, it has sparked a lot of discourse on a platform known for discourse. We brought on Substack CEO Chris Best to explain why the company chose to add the new feature.

**Chris Best** (1:35)
Well, it's getting hard to tell what's real on the internet.
Pangram did a study and they found that on some platforms, like on LinkedIn, as much as 40% of the text you read is generated by something like ChatGBT or AOD. And when readers have to be constantly kind of wondering, you know, hey, what is this thing that I'm getting? Am I reading something from a person? Am I reading something from AI? It kind of makes it hard to know what's real.

**Meghan McCarty Carino** (2:01)
What kind of feedback have you gotten since you added this?

**Chris Best** (2:04)
You know, we have, I think we have the entire gamut on Substack, everything from people who are, you know, deeply using AI tools to make their work, all the way to Sam Chris who wrote an essay that said something like, you know, if you use AI to write for you, I'll come to your house and kill you.
There's the whole gamut. We've had feedback all the way from, you know, we're annoyed you're doing this to like, hey, this should go much, much farther. And why don't you do this? You know, why don't you let me label it or block it or do all these things? One thing that was very interesting to me, I even heard from some creators that are using AI heavily and that we're grateful that we were looking into this and making it easier to disclose, easier to share these things, because even the people who are using these tools in a really thoughtful way to make work that they stand behind and believe in are threatened when people are kind of just, you know, making tons of low effort stuff.

**Meghan McCarty Carino** (2:59)
Yeah, and you've sort of added kind of in conjunction with this, this new feature for creators to provide a transparency note. Explain what this is and why you added this.

**Chris Best** (3:11)
Our approach is we're not trying to tell anyone what tools they're allowed to use. We're not trying to tell anyone what they're allowed to see.
We're just trying to make it transparent between the reader and the writer. And one of the features we added was we call it a how I make this statement. And so if you're somebody who wants to add a bit of context that says, hey, you know, here's how I made this. Maybe I only ever write it myself or I do my research in this way, but then I use these tools in this way. It kind of gives you a space to express and set expectations so that your reader doesn't come at it with a different set of expectations than what's real. We think that's the real problem. We sort of call that clod fishing when you think that you're reading something written by a person, but it's actually written by machine.

**Meghan McCarty Carino** (3:51)
We'll be right back.

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